of the fields, in front of the house, were little white hamlets standing against a background of graceful bamboos and tall fir-trees. The trees dwindled in size and number on the rolling moorland beyond, which stretched away for miles, and at that season the grass upon it had a brown heathery look. The distant view was bounded by high mountain-ranges, with forests creeping up the glens, light and shadow wandering over the grey crags, and dark heavy clouds giving a gloomy grandeur to the scene. Two books that I had with me were imbued with the spirit of the kind of country which lay around. One of these was the poetical works of the Laureate of the Lakes, which, and especially the "Excursion,' I read with renewed satisfaction and gratitude, as a voice from one who understood the life of the silent earth, the meaning of the melancholy moon, and of "the forms perennial of the ancient hills."

"The spirit of nature was upon me there; The soul of beauty and enduring life Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diffused Through meagre lines and colours, and the press

Of self-destroying transitory things,
Composure, and ennobling harmony."

The other book to which I refer expressed the moorland spirit in its gloomiest, wildest mood. It came from that Yorkshire parsonage where the bird of the life of Emily Bronte beat itself to death against the bars of her narrow cage. Speak of torture chambers! There are things pass under the eyes of men which they can scarcely see, and cannot prevent, before which all physical pain is insignificant. But what must have been the strength, what the loftiness of that spirit which, in its unhappy youth, displayed the silent endurance which good and even great men learn to practise only in their later years? What the fate that made her

"brave, Unawed, the darkness of the graveNay, smile to hear death's billows rave?"

But our stay was ended. First A

Shui's broad honest face and then our white tower disappeared in the distance, never, in all likelihood, to be seen again by me, except down the dim vista of the Past, where they will long be visible when many palaces have faded away. Carefully wrapped up, and stretched in his chair, my friend was able to get along easily; but we had a very trying night of it on Mirs' Bay. At Shah-ee-Choong we had to wait a day and a night before we could get a boat, and at last had to content ourselves with the ordinary passagejunk, which was small, rotten, had a hole in its side, and was crowded with twenty-four bullocks and one hundred and three Chinese passengers! All the space below deck was occupied by the bullocks, and how the passengers managed to dispose of themselves above, so as to leave room for the sailors to move, was one of those mysteries which it is impossible to understand without visiting the East. We established ourselves in a covered place on deck, something like the half of a barrel cut longitudinally, with the convex side uppermost. Anticipating what would happen at night, I placed the patient in the inner side of this den, and fortified the outside with our luggage and my own body. But unfortunately the barrel was capable of elongation by a cover which drew out, and when it came on heavy rain during the night, the passengers crowded under this cover, half suffocating us, and dispersing the most fearful odours from their damp dirty clothes. My poor companion was in a fainting condition till we got a board opened, which gave him some air. These hundred passengers added to the unpleasantness of the situation, by hustling and talking loudly and angrily among themselves, while a quarrel broke out among the sailors, in which some very bad language was used, as to whether they should stop or go on. The steersman, a rough character, swore he would go on even if Mirs' Bay were choked up with rocks, giving the very weighty reason that he had sailed

all his life between Macao and Canton; and he had to be dispossessed of the helm by force. The pressure of the crowd was so great that, if I had given way to it, or yielded to their entreaties, we should have run a very fair chance of being squeezed or suffocated to death; and I was only enabled to retain my position by the fortunate accident that there was a very strong coolie next me, whom I convinced, by sundry pricks

with my bowie-knife, that it was more his interest to press outward than to press inward. As the morning was wet, we did not leave till the other passengers had gone, and noticed that they each paid two hundred cash (about tenpence) as their fare, and that each individual cash was handled and examined by the boatmen, so that twenty thousand coins were scrutinised that morning.

THIRTY years ago, as some who read these pages may remember, there was for a short time an excitement in certain religious circles in London as to some astonishing phenomena then taking place in a Scotch Presbyterian chapel. They were said to be manifestations of spiritual power; strange and unintelligible utterances, unearthly voices, awful prophetic warnings. They were, of course, magnified and exaggerated by some, and coarsely ridiculed by others. They attracted crowds, for a while; there was as much anxiety then, amongst fashionables and unfashionables, to hear the Unknown Tongues, as now to have a séance with the spirit-rappers. Men who would not have stirred a yard to have listened to an apostle's message delivered in sober English, went miles to hear something which was certainly unintelligible, and which might (they were told) possibly be Satanic. There was the same morbid craving after the supernatural, and longing for the forbidden, as now. The public had palled of new amusement; to be frightened was more attractive.

Not that the two things are to be compared for a moment in themselves. In whatever light we are to look upon the manifestations

which took place in Regent Square Chapel, they were at least no juggler's tricks or mercenary imposture. They were earnest, whatever they were. There was something awfully solemn in what they professed to be, and good men still hold them to have been. Men and women were claiming there to have received a revival of the ancient gifts of the Church; to have restored on earth the golden age of Faith, in which miracles of healing and gifts of tongues and prophecy were superseding the ordinary graces of Christianity; they spoke, it was asserted, as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." It is impossible

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it ought to be impossible-to speak lightly on such a subject; the most credulous belief would commend itself to the sympathy of any earnest mind, rather than the ribald mockery with which it was received by some of the talkers and writers of the day.

There would possibly have been less public attention drawn to these extraordinary claims, but for one name which was connected with them. The Rev. Edward Irving, in whose congregation these revelations were first announced in England, had long been known as a preacher of unusual power and

attraction. Crowds had been drawn to listen, some few years before, to that fervid eloquence, quaint picturesque idiom, and voice of wondrous power and melody-all rendered still more impressive by the form and visage of the preacher, which seemed to fit well with men's ideal of an evangelist. Doubly impressive must all this have been to the few who knew the holy life and conversation of the man. He had a higher claim to be reckoned amongst the great men of his time than could have been conferred by any gift of tongues. But it is in connection with the exciting scenes which have been alluded to, that his name is most familiar to ordinary memories; very few have had any conception what manner of man he really was. And in the remarkable Life before us, the writer claims with good right to have done an act of justice to the dead. She has also done something for which living readers, almost sickened with 'Lives' and 'Correspondence,' will be very grateful. It is saying much in this case to say that the biographer is worthy of the man; and if occasionally we feel that the voice which charms us is that of the warm advocate, not of the calm dispassionate judge, we still recognise an honest admiration as not the least of a biographer's requisites, and are content to have our judgment carried away for a while in the fascination of a narrative over which we cannot stop to philosophise.

Edward Irving was born in 1792 in the little Border town of Annan. His father was a tanner, ranking with the small freehold farmers of the district, but who brought up his three sons to what we call professions-both the other brothers becoming surgeons. Troublous as those times of revolution were, they did not disturb the quiet of Annandale; whose inhabitants bought and sold, and ate and drank

(being by no means averse to moderate conviviality), quite unaffected by the storms in the political atmosphere, which only reached them, after long interval, as very distant rumblings. The religious atmosphere was calm even to deadnessespecially, our authoress thinks, in the Church of Scotland; though we fear her English sister gave scarcely more signs of vigour and elasticity in those times. It might have been said of too many English priests, as well as of Scotch mini-. sters, that if they were decorous and respectable, it was as much as they were. They were not always that in Annandale. The then minister of Annan is spoken of as being "always himself in the pulpit-a quaint and melancholy distinction." Even this cautious praise could not have been awarded to his contemporary in a neighbouring parish, if another biography which lies before us is to be trusted.

a

"Mr Story's immediate predecessor was Mr Brown, described by an old pa rishioner who remembers him, as gran' preacher, but a wofu' drucken body.' On one occasion Mr B. fell down in the pulpit; Mr Robert Campbell hastened up to see what was wrong.

thetically, you know there's only one Oh! Mr Campbell,' he groaned pathing that'll do me good.' Mr Campbell accordingly retired and procured this elixir, and after a pretty strong dram Mr Brown revived and regained his upright position. This desirable consummation having been attained, Mr Robert was descending the pulpit-stairs to return to his own pew, when Dr Drummond, from the manse seat, addressed him in a stage whisper, 'Tell him to cut it short -tell him to cut it short.' Mr Brown, whose sense of hearing was in nowise impaired by the unpleasant little attack he had had, gave no time for the transmission of this injunction through Mr Robert, but darting a vicious glance down at his principal, said, loud enough for all to hear, Tell him I will not-tell him I will not; then resuming his interrupted discourse, he preached for an hour and a

half.'

What religion there was in the

country rested mainly on the old traditions of the soil-those records of bygone "Ages of Faith," which Puritan Scotland reverences as highly as any church of Catholic Christendom-the acts and the sufferings of those whom Mrs Oliphant calls "the home-spun martyrs of the soil."

"Perhaps few people, out of the reach of such an influence, can comprehend the effect which is produced upon the ardent, young, inexperienced imagination by those familiar tales of torture endured, and death accomplished, by men bearing the very names of the listeners, and whose agony and triumph have occurred in places of which every nook and corner is familiar to their eyes; the impression made is such as nothing it has the effect—an effect, I confess, not very easily explainable to those who have not experienced it-of weaving round the bald services of the Scotch Church a charm of imagination more entrancing and visionary than the highest poetic ritual could command, and of connecting her absolute canons and unpicturesque economy with the highest epic and romance of national faith. Perhaps this warm recollection of her martyrs, and of that fervent devotion which alone can make martyrs possible, has done more to neutralise the hard commonsense of the country, and to preserve the Scotch Church from overlegislating her self into decrepitude, than any other influence. We, too, like every other Church and race, have our legends of the Saints, and make such use of them in the depths of our reserve and national reticence as few strangers guess or could conceive."

after can ever efface or obliterate; and

"The Kirk lay dormant." If it could have dreamed, its dream might have been like Hecuba's-a firebrand coming to the birth. For the son that was born to her in the tanner's house at Annan was to burn, and to make others burn, for a while, with a fire like that of the old Covenanters,-a fire which in the end was to eat into his own heart, and bring to her rather confusion than enlightenment.

But no such anticipations were entertained of the tall robust schoolboy whom the thrifty parents sent from the parish school to Edinburgh University a schoolboy still, for

he was but thirteen-in preparation for the ministry. Some natural turn for mathematics appears to have given his only promise of distinction; running, rowing, and climbing-leaping gates and swimming rivers, and suchlike bodily accomplishments-were the best-remembered characteristics of his youth. Of any such premature solemnity and "elevation of manners" as some have ascribed to him, his present biographer finds no record. Yet the boy who, before he was twelve years old, would walk five or six miles on Sunday to the "Whig" conventicle (established by some early seceders from the Kirk) in the neighbouring hamlet of Ecclefechan, in company with an aged band of "religious patriarchs, the gravest class of the community" of Annan, must surely have given some further tokens that he had that within him which was not common to other boys.

In explanation of his early entrance upon college life, it must be remembered that the prescribed curriculum for a probationer of the Church of Scotland requires eight years for its completion. But it is scarcely a century and a half since the English universities admitted students at the same early age: they were, in fact, then, what the Scottish colleges to a great extent are now-a kind of upper grammar-school. Edward Irving's brother John, who was about two years older, and who was to study medicine, went with him to Edinburgh; and there, somewhere in the old town, up many flights of stairs, the two boys had their humble establishment; supplied from time to time, from the old house at home, with a box of such stores as the family resources permitted — oatmeal, cheese, perhaps a ham or two; and so carrying on this simple college-life from November till Maythe duration of the session-when the summer weather saw them start on their walk home over the hills for their long vacation.

Of Edward Irving's college stu

dies and success little seems to be known. Thomas Carlyle, of Ecclefechan aforesaid, his neighbour and college friend of later days, though not contemporary with his four years of actual residence, speaks of him as returning to Annan "with college prizes;" but he does not appear to have gained more than ordinary distinction. His reading was probably miscellaneous and desultory. He subsequently speaks, himself, of Hooker as the venerable companion of my early days; and there is a story of his having purchased the volumes out of his slender travelling-purse, and added them to the pedestrian's pack upon his shoulders. Ossian was his waistcoat-pocket companion at college; and when we find the Arabian Nights' standing against his name as borrowed from the college library, those who choose to trace the formation of a writer's style to his favourite authors in early years, may very plausibly point to the sources of Irving's imaginative eloquence as well as his antique phraseology.

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Having taken his first degree at seventeen, he did what was very common with students intended for the ministry,-after attending one session at the Divinity Hall, he became teacher of a newly established school at Haddington, maintaining himself thus independently for nearly five years, while still nominally resident at the university as a 'partial student" of divinity, which merely required him to go up to Edinburgh from time to time to deliver certain necessary "discourses," and undergo examinations. Still, though we have some pleasant records of the boy-schoolmaster, there seem no especial foreshadowings of the future. Rather a showy young man," some thought him; which, as our authoress warns us, from a reticent north-countryman, is a more than doubtful compliment. A Dr Welsh, to whose little daughter he taught Latin, found him sceptical and argumentative: "this youth will scrape a

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hole in everything he is called upon to believe," said he. If he did so in any sense, it was only in his intense desire to see deeper into its mysteries.

After two years he left Haddington to take the mastership of a new school at Kirkcaldy. It was a mixed school, of boys and girls, as is common enough still in Scotland; and it might be worth the consideration of some of our English educationists, who insist so strongly on the early separation of the sexes in our village schools, to note that Irving contrived to impress upon his boys something of that chivalrous deference towards their weaker and gentler companions which is one of the great elements of civilisation, until to be recognised as an "academy lassie" became a safe-conduct through all the snowball bickers and other rudenesses of the streets. ving's natural powers of influence were exceptional; but the same effect has been produced, though perhaps in a less degree, in mixed Sunday schools for the lower classes in England, more especially where a lady's teaching has been brought to bear upon rough ploughboys or street urchins. Yet the young teacher was severe in his school discipline, perhaps to a fault: "a sad tyrant" they had called him at Haddington, though they all loved him nevertheless. Here is a picture of him at Kirkcaldy :—

Ir

"Sounds were heard now and then

proceeding from the schoolroom, which roused the pity and indignation of the audience of neighbours out of doors. One of these, a joiner, deacon of his trade, and a man of great strength, is reported to have appeared one day, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows and an axe on his shoulder, at the door of the schoolroom, asking, 'Do ye want a hand the day, Mr Irving?' with dreadful irony. Another ludicrous mistake testifies to the general notion that careless scholars occasionally got somewhat hard measure from the young master. Some good men, loitering about the academy,' heard outeries which their gardens in the neighbourhood of alarmed them, and, convinced that murder was being accomplished in the school,